“And then you came here,” Rachel says.
“We moved to Cambridge in 2004. I was offered an associate professorship with tenure. Who turns down something like that at MIT? All was good until 2010, when…” He chokes up and his voice dies away. He takes another drink and pulls himself together. “My wife was bicycling home from her studio in Newton and was hit by an SUV. She was killed immediately.”
“I’m sorry,” Rachel says.
He smiles weakly at her and nods. “It was terrible. I wanted to die, but I had a daughter. We got through it. A thing like that. You think you won’t, but you do. It took us five years. Five long years. Things were finally starting to turn around, and then…”
“The Chain,” Pete says.
“March fourth, 2015. They took Anna when she was walking home from school. In Cambridge, in broad daylight. It was only four blocks.”
“They took my daughter at the school-bus stop.”
Erik takes out his wallet and shows them a picture of a bright-looking curly-haired girl in jeans and a T-shirt.
“Anna was thirteen years old, but very shy, young for her age. Vulnerable. When they told me what I had to do to free her, I could not believe it. How can anyone contemplate such things? Nevertheless, I did what I had to do. Anna was kept underground in the darkness for four days before she was released.”
“Oh my God.”
“She never recovered from the ordeal. She began having seizures, hearing voices. A year later, she tried to kill herself by cutting her wrists in the bathtub and she’s now in a psychiatric hospital in Vermont. When I go to see her, sometimes she doesn’t even know me. My own daughter. She has good days and bad days. Very bad days. My beautiful, intelligent Anna, in a bib, being fed baby food with a plastic spoon. The Chain has ruined my life and my daughter’s life and ever since then, I have been looking for a way to kill it.”
“Is there a way to kill it?” Rachel asks.
“Perhaps,” Erik replies. “Now it is your turn to speak. What’s your story?”
Pete shakes his head. “No, this isn’t a quid pro quo. Like you say, we don’t know you from Adam—”
“They took my daughter,” Rachel says. “I had to take someone else’s little girl. I’ve been having nightmares ever since. My daughter’s in a very, very bad place.”
“And you have cancer,” Erik comments.
Rachel smiles and unconsciously touches her thinning hair. “You don’t miss much, do you?”
“And you are from New York,” Erik says.
“Maybe I’m just a Yankees fan,” Rachel replies.
“You are both. And you are a brave Yankees fan. One who does not mind getting dirty looks from every single person in this town.”
“I’d be happy if it was only looks,” Rachel says and manages another smile.
“I have been researching the entity known as The Chain for over a year now,” he says and passes his notebook to Rachel and Pete. They undo the elastic strap and open it.
It is filled with dates, names, charts, observations, data points, extrapolations, diary entries, essays. All written in black in a spidery, tiny script. Written, they note, in a cipher.
“At first there was nothing; fear kept people quiet. But then I dug deeper and I found references to The Chain in anonymous personal ads in newspapers. I noticed one or two obscure hints here and there. An odd crime report that did not add up. I did a sieve-map analysis, statistical-regression analysis, Markov chain modeling, a temporal-event analysis. I collated the results and regressed them, and I have come to a few conclusions. Not many, but a few.”
“What conclusions?” Rachel asks.
“I believe The Chain began sometime between 2012 and 2014. The regression analysis leads back to a median date of 2013. The ones who run it, of course, want us to believe that it is an ancient entity that has not been bested in scores, even hundreds, of years, but I think this is a lie.”
“An ancient provenance makes it seem even more unbeatable,” Rachel agrees.
“Exactly. But I do not think it is ancient,” Erik says and he takes another sip from his glass.
“I don’t think so either,” Rachel says.
“What other conclusions have you reached?” Pete asks.
“Obviously, the builder of The Chain is very intelligent. College-educated. Genius-level IQ. Very well read. Probably around my age. Probably a white male.”
Rachel shakes her head slowly. “I don’t think so,” she says.
“I have done the research. Predators like this generally operate within their ethnic group. Even allowing for the pseudorandom element in victim selection. He’s around my age or perhaps a little older.”
Rachel frowns but says nothing.
“The Chain is a self-perpetuating mechanism whose purpose is to protect itself and make money for its founder,” Erik goes on. “I believe The Chain was designed by a white male in his late forties early in this decade, perhaps as a response to the recession and banking crisis. Possibly adapted from Latin American replacement-victim kidnapping models.”
Rachel takes a sip of her Guinness. “You might be right about the inception date but you’re wrong about the age and the gender.”
Erik and Pete both look at her with surprise.
“She’s not as old as she pretends to be and she’s not as smart as she thinks she is. She was bluffing with me when she was talking about philosophy,” Rachel continues. “That’s not her area of expertise.”
“What makes you think it is a woman?”
“I can’t put my finger on that. But I know I’m right. I was talking to a woman who was using a voice-distortion machine.”
Erik nods and writes something in his notebook.
“Were you contacted by burner phone and the Wickr app?” he asks.
“Yes.”
He smiles. “The Chain has protected its security very cleverly. The anonymous phone calls using burner phones, the anonymous Bitcoin accounts that last a few weeks and disappear, the anonymous encrypted Wickr app whose ID gets changed periodically. The hiring of proxies to do the dirty work. Very clever. Almost foolproof.”
“Almost?”
“Some of it is unassailable. In my opinion, it would be impossible to backtrack through all the links of The Chain to find its origins. This is, of course, because of the pseudorandom element in the selection of the victims. You had a free choice of target, as did I, and so on and so on all the way back. Attempting to trace that trail to its origin will not work. I know. I have tried.”
“So how do we find the people who run The Chain?” Pete asks.
Erik picks up his notebook and flips through it. “For all my research, actually, I have come up with very little in the way of solutions. I—”
“You’re not telling me this whole meeting was a waste of time?” Pete interrupts.
“No. Their methods are good but when you are dealing with human agents, mistakes can be made. No agent is perfect in his or her tradecraft. Or so I suspect.”
“What mistake has The Chain made?”
“Perhaps they have become a little complacent, a little lazy. We shall see. Tell me about your last interaction with them.”
Rachel opens her mouth to speak, but Pete puts a hand on her arm. “Don’t tell him anything else.”
“We have to trust one another,” Rachel says.
“No, Rach, we don’t,” Pete says.
He doesn’t catch his own mistake but Rachel does and Erik does. Erik takes the notebook and presumably writes down Rachel.
We’ve come this far, she thinks. “It was a month ago. The first week of November,” Rachel says.
“They called you?”
“Yes.”
“And used the Wickr app?”
“Yes. Why is that so important?”
“The Wickr and Bitcoin accounts are protected by the highest levels of encryption commercially available, which would take tens of thousands of hours of supercomputing time to break. And I am
certain that, at least in the beginning, they changed their Wickr app ID periodically for extra security. And, of course, there may be various layers of redundancy and dummy accounts. But even so, I believe I have found a flaw in their method of communication.”
“What flaw?”
The waitress opens the door and pokes her head in. “Will you be wanting to order food?” she asks in a Scottish accent.
“No,” Erik says coldly.
When she’s closed the door, he begins putting on his coat. “She’s new,” he says. “I don’t like new. Come on.”
54
A bench on Boston Common. A cold wind whistling in from the harbor. They’re opposite the memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the men of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment. Not many people around. Just a few joggers, college students, people pushing strollers.
Rachel watches him and waits. When Erik finally feels safe he continues: “The standard construction of pseudorandom encrypted functions is generally believed to be leakage-resistant, but I don’t think it is. And when you have sloppy tradecraft, you make it slightly easier for people like me.”
“I don’t understand,” Rachel says. She looks at Pete. He’s in the dark too and he has a software background.
“They reach out to us in two ways, and both ways, I believe, can be decrypted,” Erik goes on.
“How?”
“The burner phones aren’t as safe as everyone thinks they are, even if all the calls are made from brand-new burner phones housed inside a Faraday cage. The consensus is that calls made by such a method would be completely untraceable,” Erik says with a grin.
“But you’ve thought of a way to crack it, haven’t you?” Pete says.
Erik’s grin broadens.
“This has been my primary area of research for the past year.”
“What’s the trick?”
“It is theoretically possible to measure power levels and antenna patterns through software that can be installed on a smartphone. The phone can then analyze the incoming call in real time.”
“You’ve done this?” Pete asks, impressed.
“I have been tinkering with such a concept.”
“You can trace a call made on a burner phone?”
“No, but the cell phone’s base station—the closest wireless tower—could possibly be found,” Erik says cagily.
“You’ve done it! Haven’t you?” Pete insists.
“Tell us,” Rachel pleads.
Erik waits until a jogger passes before continuing. “I am in the process of finishing up my design of a hunter-killer application that can seek out the base station closest to where a cell-phone call has been made, even a burner-phone call made from inside a Faraday cage. Once the base station has been pinpointed, it might be possible to narrow the frequency of the phone’s signal, giving you a rough vector from the phone tower to the phone itself within, say, two or three hundred meters.”
Rachel isn’t sure she understands all this. “So what does that mean?” she asks.
“There may be a way of following the thread into the heart of the labyrinth,” Erik replies.
“And the Wickr app?” Rachel asks. “That’s their primary method of communication.”
“A not-too-dissimilar technique. My hunter-killer algorithm can’t break the message’s encryption or find the sender, but it can find the cell-phone base station that’s closest to where the message was sent from. Obviously, if they’re communicating from Times Square in New York City, we’re screwed, but if they’re calling from a private residence, we might be able to trace them.”
“Why haven’t you done it?” Pete asks.
“Because I was last in contact with them two and a half years ago and the burner phone they used to talk to me has been destroyed and the Wickr ID they used to communicate with me has been changed. The trail has gone cold. Whereas you…” he says, looking at Rachel.
“Me what?”
“If I’m right about their tradecraft, they still might be using the same app ID to speak to you.”
“They are. They sent me a message at Thanksgiving.”
“Perfect!” Erik exclaims.
“How would it work?” Rachel asks.
“You would have to provoke them or threaten them or worry them sufficiently so that they want to communicate with you. They may message you or, better yet, call you on a burner phone. If they talk long enough, we run the software, and we can possibly triangulate the base cell tower their phone is in contact with.”
“And if they’re in Times Square or driving or otherwise on the move? We’ll have pissed them off with no hope of finding them. And we’ll have painted a target on our backs and they can come after us!” Pete protests.
“The plan is not without risk,” Erik says.
“For us. It’s all risk for us. It’s zero risk for you,” Pete says.
“What would I have to do, exactly?” Rachel asks.
“No! Rachel, don’t agree to—” Pete begins.
“What would I have to do?” Rachel repeats.
“You must get in a dialogue with our Unknown Caller on Wickr or, better, on the phone and let me run a live trace when they contact you.”
“What do you mean, a dialogue?”
“You draw out the conversation as long as you can. The Wickr trace isn’t very accurate, I’m still working on the software, but a phone trace? A phone trace from a conversation that could last two or three minutes? That would be great.”
“What would happen?”
“I trace them through the hunter-killer algorithm and eventually with a little luck I find the base cell tower that the call is coming from.”
“Does it work with landlines?” Pete asks.
“If they’re dumb enough to call us on a landline, I’ll have them in two seconds.”
“I think that will make them think I’m some kind of a problem,” Rachel says. “A long conversation like that. I’ll be drawing their attention to me and my family.”
“Yes,” Erik agrees. “And I must confess that the app is not fully functional. I am very much in the beta stage. Tracing a phone call that could be anywhere in the whole of the United States requires a lot of computing power.”
“What if you could ignore most of the United States and just focus on one area?” Rachel asks.
“That would make things a lot easier,” Erik says. “But I can’t do that. They could be calling from anywhere. Even abroad. I—”
“She’s from Boston. And The Chain seems to operate mainly in New England. Close to home. They’re keeping it nearby. That’s what I would do in case of trouble.”
“How do you know ‘she’ is from Boston?” Erik asks. “I didn’t notice a Boston accent.”
“She’s gotten rid of it. She talks very deliberately when she’s using the voice-distortion machine. But you can’t quite get rid of all the intonation, can you? I started to suspect it, and I tried something with her in one of our conversations. We were talking about the Boston police and I said that they would arrest you for banging a uey. She laughed at that because she understood it. I’d never heard that expression before I moved here. There’s probably a lot of people outside of Boston who would also understand it, but my hunch is that she’s a Bostonian.”
Erik nods. “This is helpful. If the app doesn’t have to search anywhere but New England, it would be a lot more efficient. Orders of magnitude more efficient. North America has five hundred million people and billions of phone lines. New England has perhaps ten million people.”
“Your app might work fifty times faster,” Rachel says.
Erik nods. “Perhaps.”
“But there must be some other way of doing this, one that doesn’t involve drawing attention to ourselves,” Pete says.
“None that I’ve been able to come up with. You still have a direct contact with them. It will be risky but not recklessly so. We run the app, and when we find out where they are, we leave an anonymous tip with the police. Maybe even wait a month or so
, so they don’t make the connection between our call and their arrest.”
“I don’t like the sound of this at all,” Pete says.
“Time is of the essence. Soon they will change their Wickr ID and we will have no way of directly communicating with them. And that recent break-in has given me pause,” Erik says. He writes something down on a piece of paper. “This is my new burner-phone number. I will need you to make a decision soon.”
Rachel takes the number and looks at him and then at the war memorial behind him. A line of verse goes through her head, that one about Colonel Shaw riding on his bubble, “waiting for the blessèd break.”
We’re all riding on our bubbles, she thinks, we’re all waiting for the blessèd break.
She offers Erik her hand. He shakes it.
She gets up from the bench. “We’ll have to think it over,” she says.
55
Erik goes back to his office at MIT feeling good.
He has some hope at last after the long information drought that has hollowed him to the bone. This is a chance. The game is well and truly afoot now and those bastards are going to get theirs.
He had thought that he was going to have to take out a newspaper ad in the New York Times challenging The Chain to call him or he would reveal their existence. But they would not have responded to the ad, and, worse, sooner or later they would have found out who placed it, and thus his life and his daughter’s life would have been in grave jeopardy.
Rachel is right to be nervous about antagonizing The Chain, but better her than him, he thinks, and then he immediately feels guilty about this thought.
It’s us against them. All of us. Rachel. A godsend, meeting her. She’s smart too. Such superb insights. Of course he should have focused on Boston. Most of the data points he has are in New England. Those potential hits he discovered in Colorado and New Mexico are outliers.
Yes. This is real progress.
Almost with a lightness in his step, he gets into his battered Chevy Malibu and drives out of the MIT staff parking lot.
He doesn’t notice the stressed-looking woman watching him through her windshield. He doesn’t notice her follow him home to Newton.
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